Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has called for a general election in the wake of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation on Monday morning, arguing that any replacement will lack a mandate to govern the British people.
The political churn continues at pace in London, with Prime Minister Starmer on Monday becoming the sixth leader to be forced to resign over the past decade as pressure mounted from within his left-wing Labour Party to stand down in the wake of a disastrous performance in May’s local elections, in which Farage’s poll-topping Reform UK demonstrated the ability to capture councils long considered safe Labour heartlands.
While Starmer announced his resignation, he also laid out plans to remain in office for the rest of the summer, giving his government time to get their legacy ducks in a row and allowing for a Labour leadership contest to be waged. Recently elected MP Andy Burnham — who stepped down from his post as Manchester Mayor to run for Parliament with the express purpose of deposing Starmer — was quick on Monday morning to confirm his intention to stand for leader and, hence, Prime Minister.
Burnham, who previously failed twice to become Labour leader, appears set for a coronation, with widely speculated chief rival, Health Secretary Wes Streeting, saying on Monday that he intends to support the new Makerfield MP for leader. However, it is possible that other candidates may yet throw their hat in the ring before the July leadership contest is held.
Although the former Manchester Mayor will not be constitutionally bound to hold a fresh election — with his mandate technically coming from the support of members of the House of Commons — it remains to be seen if he will be able to regain the popular legitimacy that quickly faded away from the Labour Party after being given power in what largely amounted to a protest vote against the Conservatives in 2024.
Calls for a general election came quickly from Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who demanded that the UK public be consulted “at the soonest possible date”.
“The British public have made their voices clear in May this year and last: Britain is broken and they want a radical reforming government that will fundamentally fix our country. But instead, Westminster wants to crown Andy Burnham off the back of a single by-election,” Mr Farage wrote.
The Brexit boss said that the constant turnover of prime ministers — some of whose political scalps he took personal credit for taking — has become “farcical” and “reminiscent of post-war Italy.”
“Is that the sort of politics Labour voters wanted to see repeated when they took a chance on a different party in 2024? No. They wanted to see the Tories thrown out of power, in the same way Makerfield voters only wanted to see the back of Keir Starmer. Removing a failing leader, only to replace him with another one – without a public vote or even an open discussion – is not a fair deal for the British people,” Farage commented.
The Reform chief accused the Labour government of having lost its claim to a governing mandate by diverging from the 2024 manifesto upon which the party was given power by the public, listing tax hikes, failures to “smash the gangs” smuggling migrants across the English Channel, pushing for Digital IDs, the death tax on farmers, the attempts to hand over the Chagos Islands as examples of moves made by Starmer that were not in the manifesto.
Perhaps even more critically, Mr Farage noted that very little is known about the man set to become the seventh prime minister over the past ten years, saying that while he has spent his whole life in politics, little is actually known about where Burnham truly stands on the issues.
“Where was Andy Burnham? The man who now presumes to be our Prime Minister based on less than 25,000 votes. The man who has spent his entire life in politics, and yet who we seem to know so little about,” Farage said. “That, of course, is by design. When Burnham wasn’t promising Makerfield residents that a vote for him was the quickest way to remove the Prime Minister, he was pretending to anyone who would pay attention that he was really someone else.”
“Suddenly, he wasn’t the Andy Burnham who had served in Gordon Brown’s government (and voted for the war in Iraq), or who had lost a leadership campaign to Jeremy Corbyn. He wasn’t the Andy Burnham who campaigned for migrants to have access to public money through our benefits system, or the Burnham who thought biological men should be allowed to go into women’s toilets,” he quipped.
The constant flip-flopping from Burnham over his career demonstrated a “contempt for the British people”, Mr Farage said, claiming that for “men like Burnham, democracy is only a means to an end, to be discarded as soon as it is inconvenient for his personal ambitions.”
The Reform boss was not alone in suggesting that an election be held, with even Labour minister Mike Tapp MP saying that the law should be changed to ensure that “if a change of leader is forced by its own Party then a General Election must be called” to prevent the “constant churn” in Westminster.
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